At 10 years, Street Roots builds on its base

Although the paper has become newsier since its inception, the primary mission remains giving homeless men and women a way to earn some money and self esteem. At any given time, about 80 people - such as David Hudnall, who works the corner of Northeast 15th Avenue and Broadway - sell the paper on corners in the area

Times are tough in the media business, as they are in most for-profit corners of the world. But in the cramped Old Town office of Street Roots, the nonprofit newspaper celebrating its 10th anniversary, everything is in expansion mode.

The biweekly's bosses are hiring more staff for reporting and fundraising. They're opening a satellite office in outer east Portland. They're talking about going weekly. And they're succeeding in less quantifiable ways:

"Our readership is changing, growing," says Street Roots director Israel Bayer, a big bear of a guy who has been part of the paper since almost the beginning. "As the newspaper has gotten better, as our coverage has gotten better, more people are paying attention. Now we have bankers reading us. It's kind of weird, but also cool." Most Portlanders who know anything about Street Roots recognize it as the paper sold by homeless people. Vendors, all sleeping on the streets or nearly there, buy copies for 25 cents each, sell them for $1 and keep the rest for profit. Their cost has dropped over the years, but Bayer says he never wants to give the paper to vendors for free.

"It's a way to make some money, sure, but it's also a way to build that sense that you're taking care of yourself," he says. "When you pay for something, there's a sense of ownership."

Over a year, more than 250 people will sell Street Roots. At any given time, there are about 80 vendors, who can earn a couple of hundred dollars a week. Senior vendors, the ones who have been selling more than two weeks, are rewarded with regular spots. Everyone else gets recommendations -- the dry-erase board in the paper's office suggests selling outside popular Sunday brunch spots and upscale grocery stores. The best locations, it turns out, are more affluent neighborhoods.

For many well-off Portlanders, buying a copy outside Trader Joe's or Whole Foods may be the only contact they ever have with a homeless person. For many newly homeless people, the Street Roots office is their first stop.

"Some of the people who come in here are still under the illusion that there's a safety net," Bayer says. More and more, we're seeing people walk in who aren't familiar with how you negotiate the system. We're seeing more families and more people who've never slept on the street before."

Tom Tiller, 56, has been selling copies since he arrived in Portland a few weeks ago. He says he's traveling the country looking for his children from past relationships, and he's hawked street papers in four or five other cities. He sold about 200 copies of Street Roots during the past two weeks, earning enough to stay stocked in tobacco and food.

It isn't fun or easy work, standing all day, approaching strangers who often aren't exactly eager to strike up conversation with a homeless person. But it's better than the alternatives.

"People are nicer to you if you're selling Street Roots than if you're panhandling," says Nathan Junkin, who has been homeless off and on for almost a decade. He's been selling papers downtown since the beginning of the year.

He greets passers-by in a soft voice -- "Can I interest you in a Street Roots?" -- holding up his wares in a see-through plastic sack.

"I think most people know what this is," he says. "I don't have to explain it."
Evolving coverage
In the beginning, the paper was amateurish, filled mostly with poems and artwork created by homeless people. Seven vendors sold copies, and the production staff was all volunteer.

Now about 80 people sell each issue, covering a territory that stretches across the Columbia into Vancouver. The production staff includes three full-time and three part-time employees.

The paper has become more newsy, even muckraking, in its analysis of the city's anti-loitering law and the use of private security guards downtown. Recent cover stories examined the lives of sex workers and immigration laws, expanding the paper's core mission beyond helping the homeless to helping anyone outside the mainstream and the middle class.

"We have tried to ... make it less us-versus-them," Bayer says. "When we were just ranting or writing for one readership, we were helping form stereotypes rather than breaking them."

There are times when it's hard to do that. Last summer, homeless people camped outside City Hall for two weeks to protest police sweeps of popular camping spots.

Street Roots offered online updates and had multiple reporters on the scene. Bayer says some in City Hall thought they were riling up protesters, working behind the scenes to keep things going. But the questions he and colleagues asked then-Mayor Tom Potter and other city leaders were no more pointed in their underlying support for the protest than those coming from reporters from other alternative papers such as the Portland Mercury.

In the early years, Street Roots staff helped lead the movement behind Dignity Village, the city-sanctioned tent city, by writing about and protesting against Portland's camping ban. But, gradually, the paper has moved away from overt community organizing. Street Roots still publishes Rose City Resources, a guide to services for homeless people. But Bayer has stopped testifying at City Council meetings and volunteering on task forces and committees looking at issues of homelessness and affordable housing.

"At a certain point, it felt like we were beating a dead horse, or maybe preaching to the choir," he says. "We decided we could have a higher impact through the newspaper, through building readers."
Beyond Portland
It's not just one newspaper, and not just readers in Portland. Street Roots is part of a growing network of street papers around the world that share stories and ideas for both helping homeless people and increasing circulation and fundraising. The North American Street Newspapers Association has 27 members with a total circulation of more than 267,000. The International Network of Street Papers has members in 40 nations -- especially impressive given that the first paper began in New York City just two decades ago -- and its leaders have put a special focus in recent years on publications in Africa.

"I think it's pretty safe to say that none of us knew what we were doing when we started," Bayer says. "There aren't a lot of journalism school grads in this work. There aren't even a lot of master's degrees in social work. But there is this niche that needs to be filled."

Bayer has a 10th-grade education. Yet while those of us who are in journalism to make a profit (or at least a steady, mortgage-paying wage) struggle to keep up with new technologies, he's succeeding with a much smaller, different model.

"Five years ago, we felt like maybe half the people buying the paper were doing it as a charity thing -- buying it, then using it as a bird-cage liner," Bayer says. "Charity buys are just fine. We figure some of those people will end up opening the thing up, and then we've got them."